Last week's prompt. I promised Ken.

It's neither polished nor close to developed/finished, but it IS short. I promised I'd post something...

“So, I totally forgot I was going out tonight,” grins my doppelganger’s bespectacled brother. He’s addressing a friend of mine—Jason. I overheard. I’m very good at overhearing. Some might call me an active overhearer of things, and I would tell them there’s a real word for that—eavesdropper.

           

            “What?”

 

            My doppelganger’s brother is standing close to Jason. They’re friends and the music is loud.

 

            “I forgot I was going out tonight.”

 

            Whether or not they’re both a little intoxicated, they look it. Each holding a bottle of local brew—something with a dog or a busty blonde on the label probably—leaning toward each other as though their foreheads are unusually heavy and conversing in a quiet yell. This living room might be a bit small for the full D.J. Spin set up. I have to stand close to overhear.

 

            “I put my jacket on to take the garbage out. Forgot my shirt!”

 

            My doppelganger’s brother laughs, shakes his head—he’s so whimsically laidback and absent-minded. His zip-up hoodie is opened a fourth revealing a hairyish pale and skinny chest. When I saw him earlier in the evening it seemed European. Do Europeans do things like that?

 

            Jason cocks his head, “Again?”

 

            “What?”

 

            “You’ve done that before.”

 

            “Oh.”

           

            Hell, we all need conversation starters.

           

*

 

            This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is true. On a more interesting/contradictory note, I have lied a little, but you’ll spot that a mile away—you will. For instance, if I say something to the effect of “… at this party blah, blah cocktail weenies...” that’s probably true, but if I follow that with “… somethin’ somethin’ tiger!” you can see that that’s a lie from a mile’s distance. Sometimes it will be harder though. For instance, “without knowing me, standing outside this garage venue, Christina insinuated that I’m dashing.” That could be a tough call. Who’s this Christina? And who says “dashing?” And who says I’m not embellishing just to increase your estimation of my dashing qualities? You’d be right to raise your eyebrows—to be dubious—so what I’ll do is I’ll signal you. Anything not recognizably untrue from a substantial distance will be followed by a plus sign: +.

 

When you see + what I really want you to see is my head cocked, lips pursed, brow furrowed, and potentially dashing face shaking slightly from side to side as if to say “no,” but in a good-natured manner—as if your jokester dad just told “one of his fibs,” as your mom puts it, and she’s there behind him letting you know it’s fictitious. Do you have parents like that?  

 

Without knowing me, standing outside this garage venue, Christina did insinuate I had a certain dash to me. More directly, she assured me that some Francisco guy is “quite dashing,” after it had been decided that I look like Francisco. So… transitive properties, right? I didn’t announce that I’d have to destroy Francisco, but I made note of him on my internal Doppelganger Watch List.

 

Francisco doppelganger: Dashing. Possibly Latin.

Status: Not destroyed.

           

It turns out I have many doppelgangers—regularly being reported to me. Only in the last five to six years have they surfaced. Here’s the up-to-date watch list:

 

Logan doppelganger

Brother doppelganger

Ian Andersen of Jethro Tull doppelganger

Band doppelganger

Internet doppelganger

LacyJ doppelganger

Youtube doppelganger

Francisco doppelganger

 

I have to destroy my doppelgangers +. They’re bad luck—sometimes omens of the worst of luck. Check it out on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. If you run into your doppelganger, you die thereafter. If I destroy them, that makes me the bad omen—wag the dog... or dog eat dog... some dog-related cliché. 

 ... then there will be more about doppelgangers most likely... ryan

Cake Wrecks for Kathie

Sometimes, most times actually, it's good to just laugh.  I came across a blog that does this very thing for me:  Cakewrecks.  Kathie asked me to post a link here, so I'm doing it.  I'll miss you all next week.  Have fun writing, and I hope to hear from you on this blog!

About that Drawer

Dear J.,

The first thing you should know is that I grew up in a home without a junk drawer. Then I got therapy. Lots of therapy. It cost me a few thousand dollars (well spent, I add) to realize that a little disorder in a life is a good thing, an indicator of relative mental health. Honestly, if you have to make to-do lists that say things like "chop carrots," "roll up hair," "buy one-cent stamps (postage going up)," something is, well, off. I found such a list composed by my mother after her death in that special place on the end table by her special place on the love seat and it made me hyperventilate. I used to make lists like that until I got the therapy. You would not have liked me then. (I'm still friends with the roommate I took in in 1980--I met her after the divorce when I had to find a way to afford the mortgage and keep the house, the only asset I'd ever had.) Anyway, just a few days ago, she reminded me about the day she offered to mow the lawns in the front and the back yards and I told her, Okay, but you have to cut them on the diagonal both directions like they do mowing the baseball fields because you get that really neat crosshatched look. Or something to that effect. And she says now that she knew right then I needed therapy but was too polite to say so.

The junk drawer is located to the right of the built-in gas stove in the kitchen. Please notice that the cooktop is made of black glass. This means that it shows every speck of dust when the sun sets and every single spatter of cooking oil after I use the wok. Notice that it is pristine. Here is what that takes: a sinkful of clean suds. Dawn dishwashing liquid is best, it takes the grease away, so they say; a clean dish rag; three wipedowns with the dish rag and the Dawn suds; two papertowels to dry the surface and notice the cooking oil (the smears are obvious) that you've missed; fifteen more papertowels dosed with Windex to eliminate the smears. Another friend once watched me clean the cooktop and that's when she says she knew I needed a little more therapy.

The junk drawer you are now beholding, that is to say, is one of the supreme achievements of my therapist, I'm positive of this.

You can throw out those weird vials that look like test tubes; they came with the occassional long-stemmed rose from the car dealership along with the flower preservative packets. I never liked roses, especially roses from the auto repair department. I mean, I may be a woman with an ailing Toyota, but I'm not stupid and I'm not that desperate. PUL-LEASE.

The rubberbands. Good lord, what do you do with twenty-five years of those? Return them to the Newspaper Agency? I couldn't throw them out. Every time I tried, all I could imagine was some poor seagull at the landfill with one of those rubberbands garroting it and a nestfull of starving little baby seagulls waiting for mom to come home to disgorge some quarter-pounder with cheese morsels.

I have no idea anymore what those keys belong to, but everyone knows you can't just toss old keys in the trash. My mother (the listmaker) had a fully developed scenario involving trashpickers at the dump who could match cast off keys with the addresses in your junk mail in that same bag of garbage even if the mail was coated with coffee grounds and then let themselves into your life somehow.

The coupons. I know. They are all out of date. I know. I could never remember to take the coupons with me to the grocery store. But you'll appreciate how carefully I cut them out, no? Right along all those dash-lines with the little scissors showing the way?

That one thing way in the back. I don't know what that is. Some doohickey that fell off something that, if I threw it out, my husband (god rest his soul) would finally ask me about. Did you happen to see the doohickey that goes on this thingamajig? and I'd have to admit that I deep-sixed it and I'd get that look that said something like, You have to be joking. Any engineer would know that THAT was important. How would you feel if some editor threw out your best paragraph in the entire essay? Well, I've had that happen and it, and I, survived. Just so you know.

Oh, that's where those reading glasses ended up!

The Wrigley's Spearmint gum sticks that have dried to the consistency of nail files. Nostalgia. I used to love that gum when I was a kid. One piece, though, and you can feel the sugar attacking your dentifrice. (I can still recite the paragraph on the back of the Crest toothpaste tube, in case anyone asks. I memorized it the year I stopped chewing Wrigley's Spearmint gum, around age ten: "Crest has been shown to be an effective decay-preventive dentrifice when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.")

Miscellaneous--batteries, maybe dead (like me!), appliance light bulbs for defunked appliances, screws, seed packets from five years ago, used birthday cake candles, promotional magnets for the refrigerator, leftover currency from Canada and Mexico--sorry, you're on your own.

Don't forget to prune and water the bonsai. The instructions are in the manila envelope marked, PRODUCT WARRANTIES AND INSTRUCTIONS.

Love,
Aunt Dawn

Author's Note

This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is true and nothing has been omitted. A few exceptions and clarifications are, however, necessary because I'm worried about what I mean by the words true and nothing.

It is true, for example, that I worked at McDonald's in 1977 after being fired as an Ice Angel on The Donny and Marie tv show. It was a nadir in my professional life as an entertainer, which I faithfully portrayed in the book, but the nadir was not without a few perqs such as the free quarter-pounder cheeseburgers. In fact, McDonald's is where I finally started to get in touch with the real me; that is to say, the real big me. In addition to my duties as the fry station operator during the lunch rush --a part I never leave out since people immediately understand the lunacy of the term fry station operator, as if managing hot fat and cardboard sleeves is somehow equivalent to flying a space shuttle --my duties also included local marketing, i.e., throwing the kiddie birthday parties. I suppose my employer thought that my background in the performing arts would be an asset for the S.T.A.R. position, an acronym for Store something something Representative. As the S.T.A.R. I discovered that I didn't have the stomach for watching children eat, and since parenthood clearly requires providing food regularly to offspring and seeing that it is consumed and cleaning up afterward, I was able to access and acknowledge the not-maternal-material me.

For artistic reasons I've also chosen to meld my experiences as a waitress at Dee's Restaurant into the McDonald's experience. The dramatic tension of the story was simply better if it seemed that I was plucked from a chilly ice rink to be an Ice Angel on a weekly variety show taped in Orem, Utah, when in fact I was holding down the six-to-midnight shift at Dee's after teaching ice skating during the day. The only thing this adjustment to reality caused me to sacrifice was a description of the apparatus I used every night before closing the restaurant to refill the ketchup bottles. Basically, you dump the contents of all the partially empty bottles into a vat and then extrude what's in the vat into the empty bottles and recap them so that it appears to the customers who arrive at six a.m. and want ketcup on their hash browns that new bottles have been supplied just for them. The bottles were never sanitized, I assure you, and I also assure you that I've never been able to use bottled ketchup in a restaurant ever since. At least McDonald's offered those hygenically sound individual-serving packets.

Because I didn't want to be sued for defamation, I've also eliminated certain details about Donny and about Marie and about their immediate family. What I did know, anyway, was minimal. I was part of the scenery, frankly; I and the other Ice Angels were like flats on a set. Only I was not exactly flat, being a little too fat even when hired, according to the standards set by the ABC network, which, through an intermediary informed me that the camera adds another ten pounds, like a tax or something for being famous or the backdrop for the truly famous--a so-called fact of entertainment life that about killed Marie, as far as I could tell, who looked great on camera and almost emaciated up close. And I remember feeling really sorry for her that one week when she was on The Master Cleanse, eating nothing but drinking from a plastic jug containing that concoction of lemon juice and molasses and paprika and some other stuff you can look up on Google if you're interested in convincing your body that the end of the world is upon it.

Here's what you can trust me on: the camera does add ten pounds; The Master Cleanse is devastating for your tooth enamel; quarter-pounders with cheese are the perfect antidote for an episode of depression, and unless you're eating at McDonald's bring your own ketchup.

Dawn Marano

Bereavement

It was a nice funeral. Everyone said so. Mother would have been pleased with the nice things said about her. Different from my brother’s funeral twenty-six years previously where no one knew what to say. Intentional death carries its own taboo.

The living room feels strange without the noise and glare of the television. A sorrowful little dog with its head on its paws lies next to the fireplace. On the mantel are framed photos of my parents together, a wedding photo with her dressed in black, her only good dress, an anniversary photo sixty-two years later. My sister sits on the crocheted afghan on the sofa, her stubby arms folded across her enormous breasts. Her tennis shoes hide beneath large angry ankles. Her belly strains against the black cotton dress she bought at Goodwill for the funeral.

Next to the ticking grandfather clock is my brother, still dressed in his Sunday suit, arms folded tightly across his chest, fingers clutching his armpits. We-love-you-grandma pictures sketched by great grandchildren are taped to the frig. Inexpensive artwork on the wall above the mantel reflects my mother’s love of the ocean near her childhood home. A rented hospital bed, its mattress encased in plastic, sits folded in the bedroom, waiting to be returned. The kitchen calendar marked with birthday parties she won’t be attending hangs above the phone. A younger brother stands outside with my father, inspecting the pine trees that need to be trimmed.

“Remember that dog we had in Wisconsin? What was his name?” I ask.

“Frosty,” the acknowledged animal lover, my sister, answers. She could easily name every dog, cat, chicken, guinea pig, hamster, fish, toad, parakeet, rat, and snake we ever owned.

“There was a dog we had in Germany. I was too young to remember it,” I say.

“Harry,” my brother Jim says, still staring at the floor. Medicated into monosyllabism, he rarely speaks. Though his long-term memory is better than the rest of ours, he rarely displays it. Conversation holds no interest for him. That’s just the way schizophrenics are, we were told.

“Whatever happened to Harry?” my sister Janet looks at Jim. Teased at school and scolded at home for failing grades, she always found solace in her many pets.

“Run over by a car.” His eyes have a faraway look. We all sit comfortably silent as we dedicate a moment of silence for Harry, the dog I can’t remember.

“Remember the summer that dad built us that tall swing set? We had a lot of fun on it, didn’t we?” I asked. Jim nodded. Janet smiled. “I was so surprised when I came home from kindergarten one day to find two dead deer hanging from it.”

“I remember that,” Janet said flatly. Jim says nothing. Another silence as we remember the deer, heads hanging down, blood dripping into rusty buckets.

Mother had brought us together but she was not here to help me after thirty-five years of avoiding contact, just as she had not been there to protect me from them during our childhood.

“I liked to swim in the lake.” Janet looked at Jim. “Remember how we ran and jumped off the end of the pier?” He nods. I wince, remembering the interminable half-mile walk to the lake with the sun-softened tar burning my tiny bare feet as I tried to catch up.

“We sure swam a lot, didn’t we?” I look at my siblings. I’ve tried to remember something that my adult mind cann’t quite grasp as real. Maybe I made it up. “Do you remember a dead body floating in the lake?” I ask tentatively. I can still see the bloated stomach, fish-belly white, rising high above the water, the partially submerged face bobbing in and out of the water, unseeing eyes wide open.

“Yes,” my brother said. “I remember it,” his eyes meeting mine.

“Yes,” my sister said. “I remember it, too.”

“We never told anyone,” Janet says. The briefest of smiles passes between us. Mother would have been pleased.

by Kathie

This aint no way to run a desert! Water falls, life drinks and will store what h2o it can for the approaching dry season. In a few weeks, I will trek to another world. With this bountiful deposit the ground will crawl with living things. What magic awaits my wandering ways? Color as broad as the specturm will break through the cracks of dark rocks. Rocks as far as the eye can see will become a palette for green stems strecthing into blue. These lava fields will roll, wave after wave and I will see an ancient ocean that has crystillized before me. A world frozen in time. I will find my thoughts drifting with what nature is-SURPRISE!!
My mind will meander from memories to the now, I will get lost in the world of the desert flower, be washed with humility at the stars that rotate above my head. I will be reminded that frienship is a power all its own. I will take reverence in laughters unique ability to transform a mind and expand the heart...
Somewhere in between a sky fading into a quiet dusk, somewhere between a hush over these lost and lonely lands I will be renewed with the reasons why man is indeed in charge of his own domain, why man is capable of wonder and glorious things.

In gratitude I bow,

nek amezor

THANK YOU FOR THE FEEDBACK

I so appreciate all the helpful feedback that I got in class last night. Thanks to everyone. A friend asked me to describe this class. I told her it was my therapy group. (And I mean that in a good way.) There's nothing quite like being validated. Thank you so much.

I deleted the victim sentence in Cruelty. Because of your terrific feedback I added the phrase "I played my part" since that's more accurate today. --Kathie